


the way to forever

by intrajanelle



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-04
Updated: 2013-12-04
Packaged: 2018-01-03 11:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1069983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrajanelle/pseuds/intrajanelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It must be the side effect of dying in a glorified zeta beam. That’s the only reasonable explanation Wally can think of to explain why he can remember every life after that one as Wally West.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the way to forever

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this http://s2b2.livejournal.com/142934.html and inspired by Road To You by Five For Fighting. I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> "I was born a fool on the run  
> I've broken hearts and lost at love  
> There's not one thing I would change or undo  
> Cause all my life's been a road to you"

The first time it happens Wally still has freckles. 

He’s born at 5 AM on June 20th, 2032. Exactly 16 years to the day he was sucked into the Speed Force. When he’s old enough to understand that the dreams of lightning and ice and arrows are more than dreams he’s 10 years old and Artemis Crock is dead. He knows this because he knows her name. He remembers shouting it across an empty room, laughing it as he scooped her into his arms, whispering it into her ear, but he doesn’t know who she is or that she no longer exists until he’s sitting at his families computer and staring at her obit. She died in 2017, nearly a year after he had, in undisclosed circumstances. A mission gone bad, Wally knows. 

There’s a bad taste in his mouth and his chest feels constricted and he doesn’t know why he remembers things he’s never done but he spends the next four years doing his very best to force the memories or dreams, his psychosis, to the very back of his mind. He becomes normal with his normal, oblivious parents, and his normal, annoying siblings until he enters high school and meets the girl with red hair. 

She doesn’t look anything like Artemis. For one, she’s a ginger, for another, her hair is cropped close to her head. That, and she’s his age and in his class and not a dead archer sprung from his deluded mind. But she has the same steel gray eyes as the girl in his dreams.

He spends the next two years trying to avoid her and the two years after that trying to convince her to love him and the rest of his life mourning her when her life ends short and young in a mugging one late December evening.

It must be the side effect of dying in a glorified zeta beam. That’s the only reasonable explanation Wally can think of to explain why he can remember every life after that one as Wally West.

The second time it happens he’s born in a small town close to Star City exactly sixteen minutes after he’d died of colon cancer in a life with no one he recognized. He’s not sure why sixteen is important but it’s not important to him why it’s important because in this life all of his friends are there. 

Dick is his brother, short and sweet with the same funny laugh. Kaldur and Roy’s families live across the street in an apartment building. Megan and Conner show up on the first day of the first grade, transfers from the city. It’s like they’re a team again and Wally spends most of his time those first few, hesitant years, convincing them that they’re friends. 

Artemis arrives when they’re both eighteen. Wally has already spent so much of this life considering the possibility that he’s crazy, that when she strolls into his dorm room, his brand new dorm mate, hair short, eyes cold and decidedly male this time around, he still can’t help but love her.

She doesn’t love him this time either. Wally tries not to feel offended. He respects that here, in this life, they aren’t Wally and Artemis. They’re entirely different people born of entirely different circumstances and she isn’t able to love him the way she could in their first life together. He’s just grateful that he knows her, that she exists in this world, that he has even the slimmest chance to build the long and pleasant life with her that he couldn’t as Wally West.

The life they deserve.

He tries to keep his friends close and reminds himself over and over and over that it’s okay. It’s all gonna be okay.

In his third life, Artemis becomes adept at rejection. So adept, in fact, he barely has a chance to utter the words I love you. This time around he’s a girl and Artemis is herself, all long blonde hair and gray eyes and arrows. She bursts into his office, a black bandana shrouding her face, but he recognizes her. He always does. She has an arrow through his heart before he can be grateful for the chance to meet her.

It takes a few times around but Wally finally figures something about this reincarnation thing out. It’s his fifth life, he’s old and hoary and about to die, but the freckles dotting his skin are as persistent as they were when he was the fastest boy alive. His grandson is Bart and the boy sits at his bedside, crying while Wally tries to convince him that he’s fine, they’ll see each other soon. The boy’s eyes are still that timeless gold and it hits Wally so hard it’s as if Wolf has jumped on him in overenthusiastic greeting.

They each get to keep one thing. 

Whenever Wally has met Dick he’s always had that boisterous laugh, Megan has always, always had the same smile, for Conner, an ageless face, and Kaldur has always had gills, somehow, whether they were tattoos, scars, birthmarks, or the real thing. When Bart brings his newborn daughter in to see Wally just before he dies he recognizes the steel gray eyes on the wrinkled girl’s face.

His last words are asking his grandson to name the baby Artemis.

If he had to choose, he’d say he much preferred the lifetimes she killed him to the lifetimes she was his mother. It was ridiculous, disconcerting, when he was jealous of his own father. Especially when his father was Dick or Kaldur, or, even, once, Roy. He was called a mama’s boy, a freak, kid’s penciled Oedipus into his desk when all he ever did was go home after school day after day. 

The first time she loves him back he’s lived more lives than he can count. They’re both girls and they’ve grown up together and Wally has long ginger hair, really just a female Wally West right down to his pale skin and multitude of freckles. Artemis brushes his hair back as he cries.

“It’s okay, right? That I love you?” Artemis keeps saying, her eyebrows furrowed, like she might have done something wrong, like she hasn’t just made up for all the lifetimes in which one of them didn’t exist.

Wally nods but keeps crying even when Artemis leans forward to kiss him for the first time in a thousand years.

Of all his lives, Wally loves the ones when they grow up together the most. They share secrets and injuries and glances. In these lives they’re closer than they were at Stanford. They’re attached at the hip, integral pieces of one another that can’t be replaced or substituted. In these lives Wally finds it easy to talk her into doing stupid things, and he happens to be an expert at finding stupid things to do.

When one of their lives ends bloody and young Wally always has a hard time approaching Artemis when he meets her again for the first time. He thinks, for a brief moment, that if he stays away she’ll be safe, but then her eyes meet his and they’re narrowed and gray and all kinds of cold and he wants to make her laugh. He always just wants to make her happy.

“I just want you to be happy,” Artemis whispers. 

This time she’s the Robin Hood of their kingdom and he’s the prince. Their relationship is a secret that only their closest confidantes are privy to. They steal kisses in dark corners and when his father orders her execution Wally tries not to scream when she refuses to run away. He tries not to pitch her into a trunk and have her stolen far, far. He tries not to tell her just how much he loves her because he thinks the depths of it would scare her. 

It’s unhealthy to love one person this much, but he’s loved her in so many forms, in so many lives, that he can’t help it.

She only smiles at him as he clutches at her sleeves and begs her to run. “This is the only way to make your father happy, the only way to assure you ascend the throne. You’ll be a better king than he was.”

She’s killed by a squad of archers and Wally bucks in the arms of his bodyguards even as he recognizes the irony.

When they’re reborn brother and sister in Gotham with Sportsmaster as their father, Wally builds a new appreciation for what Artemis went through all those years ago. They’re sitting in the woods, alone, for training, according to their father, when Artemis asks him if this all seems familiar. It does, but not from this lifetime. This is the first time they’ve hunted this time around.

“It just,” Artemis says staring between the stars and the freckles along the crook of Wally’s elbow, “seems like we’ve done this before.”

After that life Artemis seems to recall small, trivial things that should be impossible for her to remember. Like when they’re born in China and they boy have long stiff black hair and Artemis tells him he’d look good as a redhead. Or when they’re dressed up for Halloween one lifetime later and Artemis insists he wear a tight yellow suit. She paints a sweeping red lightning bolt on the front of it like it’s the most natural thing in the world and only begins to panic when Wally bursts into tears. Then, there’s a day a few lifetimes later when they’re at a concert and the pulsing lights from the stage cause her to fall to her knees, head in her hands, sobbing as she drags him down with her and tells him to stay away from the zeta beams.

If Wally wasn’t so afraid of what was happening he would have prodded her, tried to pull memories from her subconscious like teeth, not let these incidents go unspoken for hundreds of year. But he was scared. He didn’t want Artemis to remember like he did. It was painful knowing her so well when she knew so little about him, but it would be even more painful to have her know him but be unable to be with him just because they happened to be born family members or enemies or animals. 

And it isn’t as simple as avoiding each other if they’re born in these circumstances. They always find each other. Somehow, someway, after the first dozen lifetimes he always seems to know exactly where she is, if she’s dead, if she’s not human or male or twenty, thirty, fifty years older.

During one life he’s six, scribbling in a notebook, when his mother mentions in conversation to his father that their neighbor’s daughter was born stillborn and Wally bursts into tears because he knows, he knows she had been Artemis. He isn’t even sure how and it scares him.

And as much as it scares him he can’t help but be relieved when he’s sixteen, a thousand lifetimes since he’d been Wally West, and he has red hair and freckles and green eyes and long lanky limbs and super speed like he’s reliving something. Like he has a chance to change things.

When he meets Artemis in this life she’s an archer with sharp gray eyes and long blonde hair and a quiver of green arrows. She doesn’t have quite the same face she did as Artemis Crock, he doesn’t look exactly like Wally West either, their features are similar but skewed like their characters had been drawn by a guest artist, but they have the same souls.

When their eyes meet Artemis’ aren’t cold. She smiles and then she hugs him while he stands, stiff in her arms. When she pulls away she places her hands on both sides of his face.

“I missed you,” she says, which, of course, is the cue for Wally to burst into manly tears. 

They fall to their knees, still hugging, Wally pressing his eyes into her shoulder as he clutches at her elbows.

“It’s okay,” Artemis says, rubbing circles into his lower back. “It’s been quite the ride, hasn’t it?”

Wally hiccups and then lets her pull his face up so she can kiss him. 

As much as he’s scared for the future, what will happen after this life, what will happen if he remembers every life after this for the rest of eternity, what will happen if they don’t get the chance to live until they’re eighty and wrinkled and cynical, he tries his very best to enjoy this moment for as long as he can. Which, honestly, isn’t that hard when he’s a superhero with his fiancée in his arms and his best friends waiting for them to help save the world. 

Yeah, it isn’t hard to see that Wally’s pretty happy.


End file.
